Ligia Zamora 00:06
Welcome to The New Talent Code, a podcast with practical insights dedicated to empowering change agents in HR to push the envelope and their talent functions. We’re your hosts. I’m Ligia Zamora.

Jason Cerrato 00:18
And I’m Jason Serato. We’re bringing you the best thought leaders in the talent space to share stories about how they are designing the workforce of the future, transforming processes, rethinking old constructs, and leveraging cutting-edge technology to solve today’s pressing talent issues. It’s what we call the new talent code.

Ligia Zamora 00:37
So if you’re looking for practical, actionable advice, to get your workforce future-ready, you’ve come to the right place. If

00:44
you really like being a payroll clerk, you’re gonna have a very limited career in HR. If you like being a consultant, and you like or design and Leadership and Skills Development and change management, you’re gonna have a great career, it is

00:58
worth taking a step back, even if that means that you’re hiring slower. But I do think it’s worth taking a step back and actually thinking about what is the Available Market? And what can we realistically hit with that?

01:11
When companies come to me, and they’re like I need to hire, but they’re not thinking about retaining their talent that’s in their company and how to see them elevate inside of their organization, heart gets a little bit sad, the most important thing you can be doing right now is investing in the teams and the talent that you have inside of your company.

Ligia Zamora 01:35
Wow, we’ve really had some outstanding guests so far on the new talent code. Those were just a few highlights from the first season featuring HR analyst Josh Bersin and DE&I leader Josh Ballas, and Women Who Code CEO, Elena Percival,

Jason Cerrato 01:50
we sure have, those quotes are a good reminder of what we’ve covered, and a great jumping off point for the new episodes and what we’re talking about this year.

Ligia Zamora 01:58
Right. So much has changed since we started this podcast in 2022. I feel like it was a decade ago. A couple of things immediately come to mind. I mean, how could we not mention generative AI came to market and it’s completely taken off, I think even my mom is playing with it. Governments around the world continue to discuss the ways we regulate AI. There’s companies and institutions creating standards for fair and ethical standards for deployment. And how this is all gonna continue to take shape is probably still in the making. But we’re closely watching all these developments.

Jason Cerrato 02:31
Yes, interesting times for sure. And that’s why it’s so important for people to come together and share best practices and learn ideas from each other. Perhaps we are in the greatest era of change in the talent space right now. And one thing that keeps coming up in all of our conversations is skills. All roads lead to skills, especially how to hire and manage talent in this new world based on skills.

Ligia Zamora 02:52
Yeah, everyone is talking about adopting a skills based approach becoming skills based organizations, I think it’s just many don’t know how to approach it just yet. They don’t know where to start.

Jason Cerrato 03:03
That’s right. And that’s where a lot of our conversations are headed this year, building and growing the skills based organization of the future where work is centered around talent and not the job. Of course, getting that technology to help you identify the skills you need is only part of the process. The other important part is the people and having the right employees in place to successfully use the technology. Yeah,

Ligia Zamora 03:23
it’s true. And I think a huge component of that is change management. We hear this time and time again, from HR leaders, it doesn’t matter who you talk to. In fact, Mercer’s Jason Overbrook talks extensively about change management being the absolutely essential piece to making a skills based organization work. I think he said something like people have to unlearn to embrace this new mindset of change fulness, so we can work smarter, more efficiently and effectively than ever.

Jason Cerrato 03:51
Yeah, I’m glad you brought up Jason’s episodes. That’s right episodes, he had so much to share. We broke it up into two parts, essential listening for anyone looking to adopt skills and make this leap into the skills based organization of the future.

Ligia Zamora 04:04
Yeah, speaking of that, we already have several HR leaders who are embracing this new talent-centered approach, talent acquisition, and talent management. And this season. We’ve talked to a few customers already well on their way in these journeys. They have such great advice to share. I just love these episodes from getting stakeholder buy in implementation, things like scaling talent intelligence in their organizations. So yeah, I think our listeners need to get ready from some great insights from several of today’s leading companies. We talked to Vodafone, John Deere Amdocs, so many more. Jason, what are you looking forward to covering most of the season?

Jason Cerrato 04:42
A lot of great conversations and it ties into a lot of conversations I’m having all over the place. You know, I’ve been traveling a lot already doing roundtables with talent execs around the US and around the world. And they all have a lot of different interests based on their industries, but there’s a few things they have in common everywhere as well. Every one is trying to keep up with the pace of change, and find ways to scale their efforts. And at the same time, people are trying to put together broad visions for the future. Many are trying to figure out how to get started. And one of the themes I keep hearing is how do you avoid things turning into a science project? These are exactly the types of things we’ll talk about more with our guests. So I’m excited to hear how they’re approaching these issues.

Ligia Zamora 05:23
Yeah, brought is true. It’s so true. And science projects, gosh, everything becomes a project, there’s so many places to start, I think it can be overwhelming at times, you know, and then you kind of get lost in the technology. So I just love these conversations, you watch them light up, you know, explaining how they brought along to other stakeholders on their journey when the light bulb went off. It’s so fascinating for me to understand each customer’s unique challenges, you know, their sponsors, how they overcame objections, how they drove influence across the organization, we have so many talent champions in the making. What do you think we’re going to be discussing by the end of this year? I mean, things are changing so fast.

Jason Cerrato 06:00
Yeah, I think by the end of the year, we’ll definitely see a shift. Transformation is much bigger than process optimization. And I think leaders are being challenged to think bigger, right, so we’ll be discussing outcomes and transformations that have a far reaching scale, bigger than many may have initially thought. And we’ll see that many of these projects and initiatives have moved beyond a single area of HR, or a single initiative or a single use case. And we’ll start to see that people will find outcomes and different metrics and ways they’re delivering to the business in ways they weren’t even realizing or thinking of.

Ligia Zamora 06:37
I agree. And I’ll add the other part that’s super exciting for me is talking about this from the employee and the managers perspective. The truth is, we’re living in new talent, truth expectations of employers have changed and we all need to step up. A lot has been said about the candidate and the employee experience. But you realize that once you embark on this talent centered approach and skills becomes your currency. The next phase is actually to transform how you manage your workforce. I mean, so many of our behaviors are ingrained. But once you manage and optimize for talent and skills, you really need to become more flexible, you know, more fluid. And that means if you think about it, the employee contract changes, how we define work changes, how we manage performance changes, and think about it, how we compensate employees changes. So there’s a lot to unpack here. And

Jason Cerrato 07:28
this is why we’re going to be more important than ever to follow in the HR tech space. You know, AI tech will continue to advance and be integrated into processes, HR will continue to adopt and apply talent intelligence, and hopefully, we’ll start to see some more of the remarkable results we’ve already seen with people in AI working together with AI, automating many mundane tasks and freeing up town professionals to focus on more important work. This is to create a truly talent-centered organization built on people’s skills and potential. There are elements of AI that may automate or remove work, but AI will also amplify the human element in organizations. Yeah…

Ligia Zamora 08:02
I’m so excited. I can’t wait. I can’t wait. Let’s get started. Let’s go learn from our customers or peers, thought leaders in the industry about the smartest and most innovative ways to do just that. So be sure to subscribe and listen all this year as we go deeper into the town space with the new talent code. Thanks for listening to the new talent code. This is a podcast produced by Eightfold AI. If you’d like to learn more about us, please visit us at eightfold.ai And you can find us on all your favorite social media sites. We’d love to connect and continue the conversation.